privacy sacrifice to use internet in their cavernous dead zone of a building

It was a worthwhile sacrifice, but I’m definitely gonna name & shame! Wouldn’t touch WiFi if it weren’t a dead zone.

Also gave me a chance to complain about some of their other business practices. (Certainly wouldn’t have shopped there if I hadn’t been asked to this one time.)

I’ve never seen this message before so they seem an outlier even in the greedy corporate world. Enough complaints and every once in a while a business changes their practices. Why not whine a little? 🙂

Not entirely sure if this is possible but I'm increasingly suspicious that they started jamming outside networks within their warehouse. Of course it makes sense that mobile data doesn't really work inside a giant steel warehouse, so perhaps it's just confirmation bias, but I can't seem to recall not having any mobile data signal at all until my last walmart visit.

I used to keep to myself and look up the location of the item I was looking for online. If they want me to bother a floor person for it though, doing that is highly preferable to giving walmart my email to sell along with any information they can extrapolate from my usage of their network.

Lol why is this an opinion? If people want to vpn out of my network I don't give a fuuuuuuuuck. Now if you're raw doggin' that traffic or sucking down the bandwidth don't bitch when I filter or throttle, for sure, but surely you can at least empathize with people wanting to use privacy tools, ya tool.

Would you say the same thing if they intercepted HTTPS connections? Or blocked popular ~~DNS~~ (edit: DNS over HTTPS/TLS) resolvers and required you to use the one advertised in DHCP?

I think if you're going to provide WiFi, just do it and stop spying on me.

The reason they want this is probably so they can tie your Walmart account to your position inside the store. And see which other sites you visit to find a better price, etc.

Exactly. "Hey, we're gonna let you use our network. But if you do anything illegal or shady on our network, we'd be held liable. So we're gonna track what you do on our network to make sure if you do try something, we can remove you from the network and have proof."

I mean, yeah, they're also gonna collect advertising data, but do you really expect to have an expectation of privacy when using someone else's network? Just like they can film you in the building, they can monitor your network traffic on their network.

If this surprises you, maybe you should do some more research on how a network actually works. And get a VPN. And maybe don't connect to random public networks(you don't even want to know what OTHER PEOPLE can do to you on those networks, nevermind the company).

Also, you pay for your cellphone service, right? Are you paying for the wifi in the store? Nooooooo. They're giving it to you for free. Almost like they're offering you something in return for that data monitoring. Like they're offering you a service with a built in method to recoup costs... A service you voluntarily use and in doing so, agree to their terms.

Or you, you know, don't use it.

Or use a vpn if you really must. I’ve noticed that most Walmarts have really bad cellular connectivity and this is probably the reason why

Large warehouse type buildings make getting a signal difficult ESPECIALLY in a walmart. I prefer using the app to find items I wouldn't otherwise know where to look.

Using OpenVPN or Wireguard should work because they typically use port 443, which you can't block without killing the internet connection altogether.

I use a VPN just fine inside a Walmart. It's annoying you need a Walmart account now to use it.

A wire guard peer would probably be better